Saturday, September 29, 2012

Viktor Ullmann's opera The Emperor of Atlantis, written in 1943 in Terezin, is a centrepiece of English Touring Opera's new season and opens at the ROH Linbury Studio on Friday. Here's a slightly longer version of the piece I've written about it for today's Independent. Before the first performance some early evening events will include a short interview that I will give with Anita Lasker Wallfisch, cellist and survivor of Auschwitz, where Ullmann, his librettist and most others involved with the creation of this opera met their deaths.

Also, do see ETO's video about the opera:

In 1944
the Nazis released a propaganda film entitled The Führer Gives the Jews a City. Terezin, in north-west Bohemia, was
the place in question: it had been turned into, supposedly, a show-camp, a
smokescreen to blind the world to what was really going on in the other
concentration camps. The film – an elaborate hoax – showed artistic individuals
within Terezin engaging in creative activities, giving concerts and even putting
on their own operas. It did not disclose the grimmer reality that more than
50,000 people were crammed into living quarters designed for 7000, where
thousands were dying from starvation and disease.

Much of
Prague’s Jewish population was deported to Terezin, including a number of
brilliant musicians and intellectuals; and, perhaps in a terrible irony, they were
indeed able to pursue their creativity with what facilities were available. But
after their deaths – many of them in the gas chambers of Auschwitz – the
musical achievements of Terezin’s inmates, including the composers Viktor
Ullmann, Gideon Klein, Pavel Haas and Hans Krasa, lay forgotten for decades,
until in the 1970s efforts began to be made to rediscover them.

This
autumn English Touring Opera is taking up the cause of one of the most
substantial works forged in these extraordinary circumstances: Ullmann’s
hour-long opera Der Kaiser von Atlantis
(The Emperor of Atlantis). In a new production by ETO’s artistic director and
chief executive James Conway, and paired unusually with a staged Bach cantata, Christ lag in Todesbanden, it will be
seen at the Royal Opera House for the first time (in the Linbury Studio), and
will then enjoy its first-ever UK nationwide tour.

Over the
past 15-20 years the composers of Terezin have started to be widely recognised,
though usually their works appear in programmes themed around Terezin itself. Now
Ullmann’s opera will be required to stand as a mainstream work in its own
right.

The libretto
is by a gifted young poet Peter Kien, who was also imprisoned in Terezin. It is
a black comedy poking fun at a dictator who faces a predicament when Death goes
on strike (the original title was Death
Abdicates). No prizes for guessing which dictator it satirised. That makes
it all the more remarkable that the work reached its dress rehearsal in 1943
before the authorities spotted the nature of its content. Once they did, the
performance was cancelled, the opera was banned and those involved were put on
the next transport to Auschwitz. Ullmann and Kien met their deaths there in
1944.

Before
Ullmann was forced into his last train journey, he gave the opera’s manuscript
to a friend, a former philosophy professor, for safekeeping. Its survival seems
miraculous. Yet it was only in 1975 that it was performed for the first time,
in Amsterdam. The first British production was at Morley College in 1981.

Ullmann
more than deserves wider recognition. Born in 1898 in Teschen, Silesia, he was
from a family of Jewish background that had converted to Catholicism; both he
and his father served in World War I, and the young composer’s experiences in
the conflict between Austria and Italy fed into The Emperor of Atlantis.

He became
a composition student of Arnold Schoenberg in Vienna and later of Alexander von
Zemlinsky in Prague; his repute as a conductor soon grew as well, though he was
dismissed from his post at a theatre in Aussig an der Elbe for selecting
repertoire that was too adventurous. Fleeing Nazi Germany in 1933, he
established himself in Prague as writer, critic, teacher and lecturer until he
was deported to Terezin in 1942. His output includes many excellent art songs
and chamber music, as well as an earlier opera, Fall of the Antichrist.

James
Conway of ETO first directed The Emperor
of Atlantis some years ago in Ireland; he felt it produced a powerful
impact. “Ullmann was a fantastic composer,” he declares, “and I think Peter
Kien was a beautiful and poetic writer. The opportunities to perform operas
that have a truly poetic script are few – usually in opera, the words have to
serve music and narrative. Here narrative is less important, while a visionary
quality is more significant, involving political, social and spiritual
discussion about life and death. It’s a brilliant depiction – perhaps of
aspects of Terezin, but, even more, of a state of being.”

The
music is a fragmented and eclectic mix of cutting-edge contemporary style, jazz
influence and pastiche: “It literally goes from Schoenberg to vaudeville in the
space of two bars,” says the conductor Peter Selwyn, who is at the helm for the
tour. “It has moments of extraordinary lyrical beauty. And suddenly the drums
come in and you’re whisked away into a showpiece number.”

The Bach
Cantata, Christ lag in Todesbanden,
has been specially orchestrated for almost the same forces that the Ullmann
employs – including the saxophone, but minus the banjo – to unify the two
soundworlds. “The Ullmann finishes with a chorale, so the evening will end with
a mirror of the way it began,” Selwyn points out. “The Bach cantata concerns
the triumph of the spirit and of humanity in the face of death and despair. And
the triumph of life over death is the message of the chorale at the end of the
Ullmann. That’s the message that we would like the Ullmann to have, bearing in
mind the circumstances of its creation.”

“I want
the evening to have a consonance about it,” says Conway. “There’s something
about dying that declares the richness and integrity of life, and that declares
we do not go nameless to death. That effort to take away names and histories we
will resist. This opera is a beautiful testimony to the artistic lives of
people at Terezin. Even though I insist that the piece has a life independent
of the Terezin context, one can’t ignore it. And at the end of the piece I wish
there could be applause for Ullmann, Kien and the performers who were taken and
murdered before there could be a premiere.”

The Emperor of Atlantis, English
Touring Opera, Royal Opera House Linbury Studio, from 5 October 2012, then on
national tour until 17 November. Full tour details at http://englishtouringopera.org.uk/tour-dates/autumn-2012

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Music, dance and writing in London, UK. Jessica writes for The Independent and numerous other publications. Author of biographies, novels, plays, libretti. Editor of The Amati Magazine. "Everything she writes is worth reading" - The Times..."Dazzling perceptiveness" - Joanna Lumley on Songs of Triumphant Love...
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